Google adds zones to Compute Engine

Google has expanded the number of zones for two of its Compute Engine cloud platform regions, including a third zone in Asia.

The addition of an extra zone to us-central1 and asia-east1 takes the total number to 24 for the United States, Europe and Asia regions.

Compute Engine product manager Scott van Woudenberg said the added zones would make it easier to avoid split-brain scenarios and to run large-scale databases like MongoDB that use quorum-based architecture for high availability.

In Google parlance, a zone is an isolated location within a region. Google also defines regions as collections of zones. 

Zones are connected by high bandwidth and low latency network circuits in the same region. Google recommends their use to deploy fault tolerant and high availability applications. 

The zones will have solid-state drive (SSD)-backed persistent disks for high input/out per second (IOPS) workloads.

SSD-backed persistent storage for Compute Engine was announced in June this year, and offers up to 100 times the IOPS for reads and 20 times as many for writes, compared to standard disks.